BurningtheInterface MikeLeggett MasterofFineArts (Honours) (MFA) 1999 BurningtheInterface Artists’InteractiveMultimedia 1992-1998 MikeLeggett ThesisforexaminationasMasterofFineArt(Honours) 1999 CollegeofFineArts,UniversityofNewSouthWales Contents Part One : Preface 5 Part Two : Artists’ Interactive Multimedia: Introduction 8 Context: narration, description and interaction 9 Jurassic Multimedia 10 Recap 10 “Before your very eyes!” 11 A pause..... 12 New Tools 13 New Images 14 The Public Domain 17 Notes to Part Two 18 Part Three : Burning the Interface<Artists’ Interactive Multimedia> 21 Art and the Computer - the Cumbersome Tool 22 Multimedia 22 CD-ROM - the 21st Century Bronze? 24 CD-ROM - a Medium Revealed 25 Plasticity and Permanence 25 Cost Effectiveness 25 Independent Production 25 Distribution and Exhibition 26 Interface 27 Interact / Immerse 28 Navigating Levels of Meaning 29 Probing the Interface (1992 - 1997) 30 The Tractable Process 31 Notes for Part Three 34 Part Four : Four Reviews - CD-ROM and the WWW 35 Four Reviews: 36 FAMILY FILES by Mari Soppela 37 PLANET OF NOISE by Brad Miller and Mackenzie Wark 40 WAXWEB by David Blair BEYOND by Zoe Beloff 50 Notes for Part Four 53 BurningtheInterface-Leggett-1999-COFAUNSW page3 Part Five : Electronic Space & Public Space: Museums, Galleries and Digital Media 55 New Spaces 56 Old Spaces 57 “Please Touch the Exhibits” - Interactions 57 Curations 59 Knowledges 61 Media Formats 65 Practices 67 Exhibition Formats 69 Strategies 70 Conclusions 71 Notes for Part Five 73 Part Six : SonteL - interactive CD-ROM prototype 75 SonteL 77 Proposal 78 Production 79 Completion 80 Finally 83 Notes for Part Six 83 Appendix A - Filmography 84 Appendix B - Strangers on the Land (Working Title) 86 Appendix C - PathScape - pathways through an Australian Landscape 95 Appendix D - Curriculum Vitae 106 Bibliography 113 Published Articles and Papers 116 Illustrations 118 Acknowledgments 121 Index 122 BurningtheInterface-Leggett-1999-COFAUNSW page4 PartOne:Preface Form and Content have characterised the central obsession of artists at work in the 20th Century. Certainly, if I was to describe my central aesthetic obsession and those of my closest working friends, associates and colleagues in three words, these would be the three words to use. Though not an aesthetic exclusive to this century, the workers on the modernist project who climbed aboard as the century began, alight, as it were, as we reach its end. To describe the experience of applying this aesthetic to the process of making work, and thinking about making work, and thinking about how any work is presented to and received by others, presents its own prob- lems. How to find a form that suits the expression. A statement could use the narrative form and the first person singular and begin on the first day of life, or first day of school, or college, as a student, as a teacher, as an artist. Hacking into the substance of what seems important about the topic of interactive multimedia could also use the narrative form and construct that comforting umbilical tube that moves its nourishment - “starting at A, through K, to Z”. But such a monocular viewpoint is not how the world is encountered and is certainly not adequate to describe my research into interactive multi- media and the way in which it has been used by artists as a medium of expression. There are too many complex relationships. The narrative descriptive form, the thesis, with an introduction, a middle and a con- clusion for instance, has a tendency towards over simplifying the re- search process as well as the reception of an understanding of outcomes from the project. The very act of ordering these words is unrelated to the temporal sequence in which phases and details occurred. The choice of words and the whole technology of language as a reductive process is not the most appropriate for conveying the complexity of another itera- tive technology, especially one that in these early days of its definition and development, finding both material and poetic form. The proposal initially was to deliver this thesis in hypertext form. Much of the research process had included the writing of journal and magazine articles - the act of linking one document with another in hypertext form would have mirrored for the reader the genesis and the detail of that process. The crux of a hypertextual navigation method is that different routes are plotted through the same resource material accumulated during the process of the project. The thesis is both the subjective viewpoint and BurningtheInterface-Leggett-1999-COFAUNSW page5 the subjective object prepared from an objective perspective. It is also the resource material, the documents and artefacts that have been assembled, which remain open to other uses and interpretations. Mean- ing and meaning-making as an open and transparent construction. Whilst libraries and archives have yet to establish methods, standards and protocols for accommodating electronic hypermedia, the thesis component of this research project is delivered, notwithstanding, in this book form of conventions, and while offering a kind of ‘random access’ cannot possess the dynamic elements of hypermedia and aspects of multimedia accessible using Web browsers and the Internet. The convention that a thesis should present an argument, or develop an aspect of the discourse surrounding a particular topic, is well estab- lished but in this form of delivery becomes an oxymoron. It is due in no small part to the technologies developed as part or at least in parallel to the events of the recent past given over to the pursuit of ‘reason’. The book, the pamphlet, the essay, the journal etc, construed ‘the argument’ as the form most fitting for the construction of the proposition, its logical and linear conduct, its cool and serene conclusion. Leading onto another custom, the quaintly named ‘defence’ of contentious arguments. Here is a term that places the activity clearly within the age of technol- ogy that was dominated by the cannon and the circle of wagons, and the spirit of an age dominated by the spectacle of the adversarial lawyer charged with testosterone, deep in the heat of the thrust and parry of debate. Whilst such an approach, kept in place by hierarchies and codexs inherited from another era may have been appropriate for the age of military adventures both on and off the page, it is clearly inap- propriate for the investigation of the humanities and the visual arts. Contrary to the Homeric oral tradition, the form remains locked into a material state that enabled blocks of discourse to not only be advanced but also be archived, and thus preserve the certainty of the empirical project. As Darren Tofts has observed: “...writing is effectively a technology of the inventory, suited to the construction of lists, catalogues and archives. In this way, writing contributed to the formation of our modern, humanistic understanding of the individual as solitary, originating centre of con- sciousness, for lists introduced new values of impersonal objectivity and scientific detachment from the world.” (Tofts & McKeich 1998) This thesis then recognises the confines of the form described above. Whilst possessing taxonomic features it follows the rational path of the report, rather than the often more revealing happenstance of the aleatoric. It also presents speculation, rather than advancing tactical BurningtheInterface-Leggett-1999-COFAUNSW page6 argument, in the face of a technology base which besides being expen- sive to work with is a chimera and prone to the vicissitudes of specula- tive financial investment. Part One, the Preface, and Part Two, the Introduction, provides context for the research and brings the reader to the juncture at which the core of this report in Part Three was initiated, the point at which, with both trepidation and encouragement from my first supervisor, the media artist Bill Seaman, and with the endorsement of the Head of School, Professor Liz Ashburn, I commenced on the research that led to the exhibition in early 1996, Burning the Interface<International Artists’ CD-ROM>. Part Four examines in some detail four published artists’ work on CD- ROM, three of which are more recent than the curatorial research for the exhibition, which was completed by the beginning of 1995. Part Five surveys the range of practice by artists working with digital media and the opportunities for exhibition in the public spaces of museums, galler- ies and the street, and advances scenarios for correcting the laxity of response by the exhibiting institutions to the vigour with which Austral- ian artists have represented their work and ideas in international forums. Part Six has the dual function of on the one hand, closing the written thesis with some conclusions about ‘interactive multimedia’ and its current usefulness as an art medium to the artist, and on the other, as an introduction to the studio practice component of this MFA submis- sion. This takes the form of a prototype ‘experimental’ version of an interactive CD-ROM, a copy of which is contained in a pocket at the rear of this binding. Finally, in returning to the notion of hyperlinking, an anecdote that might help illuminate the gap between the practitioners and the institu- tions responsible for delivering them to audiences. It concerns an Alogonquin guide in a remote area of northern Canada who, when his non-indigenous surveyor companion turned to him and said, “We’re lost”, responded by saying: “We’re not lost, the camp is lost.” (Kerckhove 1995) Space in the context of this research is the infinite dimension of the contemporary electronic culture. Institutions and individuals are specta- tors and participants in this culture and need to be active in defining the ‘information’ spaces being opened up from within the culture of word technology, as primary centres of experience. The artist is very often the first to describe a new primary experience.